Honorable

I was too stupid to understand anything the article said, but not too stupid to have questions. Are you allowed to mix and match the four M.2 SSDs with different brands and capacities? Do the four M.2 SSDs appear as 4 different drives (with different drive letters) or does that depend on if they are RAIDed?

Honorable

I was too stupid to understand anything the article said, but not too stupid to have questions. Are you allowed to mix and match the four M.2 SSDs with different brands and capacities? Do the four M.2 SSDs appear as 4 different drives (with different drive letters) or does that depend on if they are RAIDed?

Functionally, the card is just a carrier for the PCIe packet switch, associated support components, and M.2 connectors. It should be completely unaware of NVMe, so you could plug in 4 of the same SSDs, or 4 completely different ones, or 2 SSDs and 2 M.2 to PCIe edge connector adapters, all fair game.

Splendid

curious as to why this isn't added to the backside of eatx or atx boards or even matx boards with some kind of heansink plate particularly to the x299 and x399 boards that support enough pcie lanes.

Hmmm...

■ Cost - high end motherboards are already quite expensive. They couldn't add something like this without driving away nearly all the customers who didn't want this specific feature.
■ Cooling - most cases don't direct much airflow to the underside of mobos.
■ Accessibility - most cases require motherboard removal to access the bottom, except for a cutout under the CPU.
■ Small market - it's not uncommon to find 2x M.2 NVMe slots on higher-end motherboards. What % of the market for a given motherboard really wants > 2?

Need we go on?

IMO, this is the best option: easily accessible, likely to have good airflow, and can be paired with many different motherboards. You could even install multiple, if you're doing something particularly crazy. Like trying to host big files over 100 Gbps Ethernet.

BTW, if a motherboard did add something like this, then it would make more sense to place the M.2 boards perpendicular to the motherboard and add a bracket to hold the other ends. This could take the place of one of the expansion card slots, so you'd have some airflow moving across them.

Polypheme

Damn, if this thing was like $50-70, it's be a real nice way to get more M.2 slots in a desktop PC. But at that price point, it's really only going to work for Workstation class systems where you use them to make money.

What many prosumers would prefer is a bootable RAID controller
that supports all modern RAID modes with 4 x NVMe M.2 SSDs.

One User at another Forum has reported success getting the
driver software for the Highpoint SSD7110 to work with the
Highpoint SSD7101. And, Highpoint has said they are working
on making the SSD7101 "officially" bootable.

I'm assuming, without proof, that Highpoint are also working
on making their SSD7120 bootable.

Distinguished

I am a little concerned about this type of product in respect to the fact that I primarily use laptops these days that are maxed out i7's with 32 or more gb of ram.

I have been considering building a new desktop (the last one I build was a socket 775 with a Q6600 in it).

If I don't really "need" a desktop right now and started from scratch, I would love to put one of these it in it, but I am also needing to consider that PCIe 3.x is going out soon for PCIe 4 and PCIe 5 is maybe 4 years out, so:

Do I build a PCIe 3.x based system now with DDR-4, massive i9's or thread ripper processors and put one of these in, or do I wait for the speed advantage of PCIe 4 or 5? Considering the laptops are working just fine for now.

Share this page

About us

Our community has been around for many years and pride ourselves on offering unbiased, critical discussion among people of all different backgrounds. We are working every day to make sure our community is one of the best.